The single women who homesteaded the West

Thanks to Western movies and
popular novels, stereotypes come easily to mind when you think of
women of the early West. There’s the saint in the sunbonnet,
the soiled dove, the schoolmarm and the rancher’s daughter.
Or maybe you remember dramatic figures like the Lewis and Clark
guide Sacajawea, or Calamity Jane of the perfect aim. But
there’s a group of gutsy women that’s seldom
acknowledged, let alone recognized: single woman homesteaders.

Historians estimate that about 12 percent of
homesteaders in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota,
and Utah were single women. Lured by the Homestead Act, which gave
any 21-year-old who headed a household the right to homestead
federal land, independent women crossed the country to become
landowners. By the early 1900s, a woman could load her belongings
on a train and in several days make a trip that once took months.
When she arrived, a land-locator took her by wagon or Model T to
find her claim. Revisions in 1909 and 1912 in the Homestead Act
also reduced the amount of time needed to “prove up,”
and they doubled the amount of land that could be claimed.

Florence Blake Smith, a Chicago bookkeeper, writes
that she learned about homesteading from a friend just before he
set out for Wyoming. Her response: “If he could do it,
I could, too.” She worked winters back in Chicago to earn
enough to support her required seven months on the claim, but never
gave up until the land was hers. Her success was typical; research
shows that women homesteaders were as apt to succeed as men.

Another Chicagoan, Nellie Burgess, 31, said she was
persuaded by “the call of the outdoors” to give up her
reporter’s job to file a claim in Idaho near the Snake River.
She proved up her claim while also becoming a proficient hunter,
gardener and fisherwoman.

Helen Coburn dropped out
of college to homestead in Wyoming with a girlfriend. They filed on
adjoining land and shared a claim shack that straddled thier
property line. Helen was Worland's first schoolteacher until Ashby
Howell, owner of the town's general store, courted and wed her. But
many women relished their single life. Alice Newberry found that
out while cooking for a hired hand and teaching in a country school
in eastern Colorado. Marriage seemed unattractive, she wrote to her
mother, because “cooking three meals a day, 365 days a year
for the term of my natural life, is more than I can face.” A
South Dakota homesteader told a Colliers reporter that her life had
seemed empty when she lived in a spacious house. “Now I have
my 10x12 house, my yellow land and my freedom, and I think that
life contains everything.”

Women homesteaders
were not necessarily fresh young things. In 1912, 47-year-old
divorcee Geraldine Lucas homesteaded 160 acres at the base of the
Grand Teton in Wyoming, and incidentally, became the second woman
to climb its peak. Widows also saw homesteading as a way to support
their families. Elinore Pruitt Stewart is perhaps the best known,
because letters she wrote to her former employer in Denver were
published in the Atlantic Monthly and then in a book, Letters of a
Woman Homesteader.

In the early 20th century, women
back East talked earnestly of women’s equality. In the West,
single women homesteaders demonstrated it. Women showed they could
take charge, instead of just following along; women could support
themselves, taking risks in an unfamiliar world. It is probably no
coincidence that the Western states were the first to grant women
the right to vote.

What did single women
homesteaders prove by proving up their claims? Like the women
honored this year by the National Women’s History Project,
they saw an opportunity and took it, leading the way for other
women to do the same. Take, for instance, 2007 honoree Suzanne
Lewis. She moved west from Florida to become the first female
superintendent at Glacier National Park in Montana, and she is now
the first woman to fill the top job in Yellowstone National Park.
Her success in a previously male-dominated profession suggests new
possibilities for young women contemplating careers today, just as
women homesteaders did for women 100 years ago.

Single women homesteaders remind us what a woman can accomplish
with determination and hard work — a good thing to celebrate
this March during Women’s History Month.

Marcia Hensley is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). She writes in Farson, Wyoming, where
she’s finishing an anthology of writing by single homesteader
women.

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Homesteading the U.S.West; especially the Plains and
Basins is still seen by
"Legend of the Frontier" historians as a
"Grand and sucessful Gamble". It was a disaster
for the majority of homesteaders and a disservice to both citizens
and immigrants by the Government. Most failed; some quickly, others
only after years and decades of backbreaking faiure in the droughts
that doomed most dryland homesteads. My area of Eastern Wyoming and
Colorado is still littered by the foundations and ghostly decaying
homestead shacks. Heroic people,women, men and
families but a horrible mistake for the landscape and
biota.
As the first head of the Deparment of the Interior, one armed John
Wesley Powell of Grand Canyon navigation fame tried to set a
different and more considered approach. He was overwhelmed by a
Congress that wanted to impose a British rectilinear survey and
Jeffersonian Agrarianism to an area not suited to either.